Dichter
Lisa Bellear
Lisa Bellear
(Australië, 1961 - 2006)
Biografie
Lisa Bellear was a formidable presence on the Australian arts scene, achieving national and international recognition in a range of fields. She was a poet, photographer, a skilled interviewer, broadcaster, comedian and academic. Her photographic work was exhibited in Athens during the 2004 Olympics and also exhibited during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. She was one of the founders of Not Another Koori Show, which has run for over ten years on the Victorian community radio station 3CR. Bellear’s poetry is uncompromising: at once fierce, unsettling and filled with both deeply felt anger and love. One of its most remarkable features is that while it is built around a performative voice, Bellear’s skills as a poet convey the force and expansion of that voice to the white space of the page.
Bellear’s work extends from a boundless energy, activism and political engagement, premised upon an immediately apparent and inspiring honesty and integrity. This is not simply literary. Hers is a work of change, coupling a savage wit with the savageness of experience; the quietude of language with the sorrows of the past and present; the political struggle with the struggle to understand; reconciliation with recognition. Her work is plainly though aggressively spoken. Her poems speak directly from the centre of experience, in the language of that experience.
Bellear herself best summed up the demands and gift of her poetry: “You can allow your eyes and heart to see. See the injustice, cruelty, and you can also hear the laughter and the love.”
© Michael Brennan
Gedichten
Gedichten van Lisa Bellear
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